Archive for the ‘Black and White Hat SEO’ Category

Three Ways You Will Be Punished For Using Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimisation experts are constantly advising against the use of black hat SEO methods and yet there are still some business owners which choose this approach. One of the reasons why so many site owners still fall into this trap is because unethical SEO companies make black hat SEO look so tempting.

Those working unethically in search engine optimisation try to make others believe black hat SEO is highly productive and yet it is quick and easy too. This is what many website owners want to hear and so they are eager to believe what they are told. Unfortunately for them, black hat SEO does not work in this way and the consequences of a black hat SEO campaign can be devastating.

If you use black hat search engine optimisation techniques, your rankings in the search results will drop significantly and your site may even be banned from the search results entirely. This is obviously the opposite outcome to what those running an SEO campaign aim to achieve. SEO is used to get websites ranked in better positions so exposure and traffic can be gained. If you use black hat SEO, you will not see this result. Instead, you will have less exposure and less traffic visiting your website because of a massive drop in rankings.

The search engines have technology to identify those sites using unethical SEO methods and punish them severely to show this approach is not advantageous.

Using black hat search engine optimisation will also severely damage your reputation. If you are running an online business, reputation is extremely important. Your company needs to be respectable and trustworthy if it is going to be successful. Online consumers do not like to shop from unethical and immoral businesses and if you use black hat SEO, it will be obvious to others your business falls into this category.

The other way you will be punished if you choose to use black hat search engine optimisation instead of an ethical approach is by wasting time, energy and money on an unproductive SEO campaign. Black hat SEO does require money and hard work and yet it does not produce the results you are hoping for if your business requires an SEO campaign. If you have used black hat SEO, you will have lost money and time and this can be extremely disappointing.

At SEO Consult, we only use white hat search engine optimisation because we know only this approach to SEO actually works. Black hat SEO is a waste of time and actually harms your business instead of helping it.

There are many white hat SEO techniques available which can help your business and we can help you to identify and use these methods effectively. Don’t be manipulated by those working unethically in SEO but work with us instead because our company is respectable and trustworthy and has been helping clients to achieve impressive SEO results for many years.

Cloaking? You must be joking! How SEO Cloaking Will Kill Your Rankings

What is cloaking?

I’m glad you asked. Put simply, cloaking is when a website shows different content to a search engine spider than it does to normal visitor.

Why would a site do this?

It’s almost always a blackhat SEO technique that aims to show search engines a keyword rich page that bears little resemblance to the actual page, in order to appear more relevant for a search term, and therefore improve the ranking of that page.

How’s it done?

When requesting a website from the server all browsers send certain “headers” before the server responds with the contents of the page. One such field is the “User-Agent” field which declares which browser is in use.

My User-Agent for instance is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

Memorable, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Google declare themselves with the User-Agent “Googlebot” when crawling your pages so by detecting this, a black hat site can present different information based on who is visiting. Yahoo! has “Slurp” and Bing uses “msnbot” as their User-Agent. Rather than use the User-Agent field, the same can be achieved by looking at the IP address of the visitor, since search engines use a certain IP range when crawling.

Does it work?

No. Not with Google at least. It used to work, and was probably one of the more advanced Blackhat SEO tactics back in the Wild West SEO days. As Google say in their Webmaster guidlelines: “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”.

The reason it doesn’t work now (and hasn’t for a number of years for that matter) is because Google will visit your pages once using the “Googlebot” User-Agent, and another time as a typical browser (say, Firefox) declaring themselves as a normal visitor. It can then compare the two versions of the page to see if there’s a significant difference.

And if you’re site uses cloaking, you’re a goner...

How do I detect it?

To detect if your competitors site is using cloaking techniques, you have a few options. You can use the cache link next to the search result to see what the search engine saw when they visited. You can then compare that to the live site.

Alternatively, you can fake your own User-Agent and visit the site as if you were a search engine. Get the User Agent Switcher for Firefox and away you go. This last one will only reveal cloaked content if the site is detecting the User-Agent, rather than the IP address. So for a one-size-fits-all approach, go with the cache idea.

More information

More information about cloaking can be found on Google’s help pages, particularly this one.